Move Over 5 Stories, More Original Clean Energy Content Coming In ’16

Five years ago, we posted our first morning energy news roundup here at ScalingGreen. Over that period, we’ve posted over 1,300 of these “Five Stories” summaries, and we hope (and believe) that they served a useful purpose to our readers. At this time, however, we have decided to discontinue the “Five Stories” series, for two main reasons.

We’re phasing out our “Daily 5” stories to focus on providing you with more substantive content about renewable energy business, marketing and sustainability issues that matter most to you. We want to focus our time and attention increasingly on producing original, value-added, thought-leadership content that will be useful to our cleantech industry readership.

We hope you enjoyed the “Five Stories” series.” If you have any thoughts on this, or any other clean energy topic, please let us know in the comments section of Scaling Green, or you can email us here. Thanks again.

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We agree with the conclusion reached by PV Magazine, that although growth in renewable power in the United States is increasingly driven by non-RPS factors, "[t]his does not mean that RPS policies are not important."

Here are some key points from a new study by the Brattle Group for NRDC, entitled "Advancing Past 'Baseload' to a Flexible Grid," which argues that far from being a problem, a higher share of clean energy is actually a great opportunity for a wide variety of reasons.

In sum, the future looks extremely bright for clean energy, and for cleantech more broadly. The question isn't whether these sectors will grow rapidly, but simply how rapidly they'll grow. On that, we'd argue that EIA is far too conservative (or pessimistic, if you prefer), while BNEF is quite possibly too conservative as well, although they appear to be much closer to the mark than EIA's typically bearish-on-renewables, bullish-on-fossil-fuels forecasts.

According to a new report by the Energy Storage Association (ESA) and GTM Research, the U.S. energy storage industry is on fire, having just "deployed 71 MW of energy storage in Q1 2017...up 276% from the 18.9 MW deployed in Q1 2016," and with a lot more growth on the way.

See below for video of Chris Brown of Vestas, keynoting the opening session on day two of WINDPOWER 2017, concluding today in Anaheim, CA. According to Brown, who is completing his tenure as Chair of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the next five years will be the "best five years of your life" for the wind power industry.

But wind and other major cleantech sectors rely on distribution-only or distribution-mostly strategies that leave most of the marketing communications (“marcom”) power of these tools on idle. This year, we looked at why that happens. A few external drivers explain a lot.